All posts by Tom James

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Wind and solar better than nuclear or clean coal

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Prof Mark Jacobson of the University of Stanford believes that (for the USA) the best solution to the various problems of energy security, peak oil, and global warming lies in wind and solar thermal power:

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric.

In Prof Jacobson’s research paper he looks at how you could power every road vehicle in the USA using different methods and finds the best combination is wind power and electric battery vehicles.

[at Physorg][image from kevindooley on flickr]

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Nanotech culture war in prospect?

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A new study suggests that the use and deployment of nanotechnology may be the new frontline in “culture war”, research from the Yale Law School and the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies suggests:

The determining factor in how people responded [to information about nanotechnology] was their cultural values, according to Dan Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School and lead author of the study. “People who had more individualistic, pro-commerce values, tended to infer that nanotechnology is safe,” said Kahan, “while people who are more worried about economic inequality read the same information as implying that nanotechnology is likely to be dangerous.”

Another study shows religion also plays a part, with citizens of more religious countries being less enthusiastic about nanotechnology than more secular countries:

They found that countries where religious belief was strong, such as Ireland and Italy, tended to be the least accepting of nanotechnology, whereas those where religion was less significant such as Belgium or the Netherlands were more accepting of the technology.

Professor Dietram Scheufele from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, who led the research, said religious belief exerted a strong influence on how people viewed nanotechnology.

“Religion provides a perceptual filter, highly religious people look at information differently, it follows from the way religion provides guidance in people’s everyday lives,” he said.

[via Physorg, Boing Boing, the BBC, and Nature Nanotechnology here and here][image from timsnell on flickr]

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GOSPLAN emergent?

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The ever-interesting Yorkshire Ranter makes a good point (nearly a month ago, but nevertheless…) that certain elements of retail behemoth Tesco’s logistical setup bear a theoretical resemblance to Soviet-style command economies:

An unremarked-on aspect of the 1.5% interest rate cut last week. Namely, are we already living in a near-real time planned economy, as Stafford Beer foresaw? It sounds like I must be joking. But how else are we to interpret Sir Terry Leahy’s trip to see the Bank of England and the Treasury? Tesco boasts that one in every eight pounds spent in the UK passes through its tills; this bit is always in the papers. They rarely mention their huge management-information system, except to the trade.

If you wanted close to real-time information about the consumer economy, I can’t think of anything that would work better.

It’s quite a leap of the imagination, but this segues very nicely with Ken MacLeod’s recent comment on the future of IT security. MacLeod suggests that we are seeing a move in politics away from decentralised, bottom-up, market-based solutions and towards centralised, top-down, state-based solutions:

What if right now, we’re at a moment when trends that looked inexorable have reached a turning point? What if the common sense of the age is about to flip from free-market capitalism to state-regulated capitalism? Of course, turning that into actual policy won’t happen overnight, or smoothly – too much political legacy code – but if it does happen then over the next ten years or so we’ll be in an age of big government projects, some sort of new New Deal. We’d find ourselves back in the day before yesterday‘s tomorrow.

Further reading with decidedly SFnal tones includes operations systems specialist Stafford Beer‘s Project Cybersyn for the Chilean government and the USSR’s five year plans.

[image from kevindooley on flickr]

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Water power 2.0

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Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new method for generating energy from water flows:

The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

More about this VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy) technology can be found here.

[via Jon Taplin’s blog][image from Jon Taplin’s blog]

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Sub-orbital tourism prices fall

Space tourism business RocketShip Tours offers 38 miles straight up into space for less than half the cost of Virgin Galactic‘s 62 miles. Hopefully this is the first of many tumbles down the supply demand curve towards mass market space tourism, from PhysOrg:

Per Wimmer, a Danish investment banker holds the first reservation for the Lynx sub-orbital flight expected to launch sometime in 2011.

Mr. Wimmer hedged his bet by plunking down the necessary reservation fee to Richard Branson´s Virgin Galactic and another rival for commercial space travel, Space Adventure. According to Wimmer, “It will be a real race to see which one goes up first”. The main difference between the XCOR Lynx is its ability to launch on any 10,000 foot runway with clear air space.

Just to remind us the future is nearly here, there is a computer generated (natch) video of what it’ll look like:

[via PhysOrg][image from Marxchivist on flickr]